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New publication on transsaccadic feature integration

Our subjective experience our visual surroundings seems continuous, contradicting the erratic nature of visual processing due to saccades. One of the ways the visual system constructs a continuous experience is by integrating pre-saccadic and post-saccadic visual input. Although this seems plausible, saccades rarely land exactly at the intended location. Transsaccadic integration would therefore need to be robust against variations in actual saccade execution to facilitate visual continuity. In the current study, we investigated the effect of saccade landing point on transsaccadic integration using a global effect paradigm. In this paradigm participants reported a feature (here color) of the saccade target, which changed slightly during the saccade in half of the trials. In these transsaccadic change-trials, all participants reported a mixture of the pre- and post-saccadic color, indicating transsaccadic integration. In global effect trials, a distractor appeared together with the saccade target, causing most saccades to land in between the saccade target and distractor. The results show that there was no effect of saccade landing point on transsaccadic integration. Therefore, transsaccadic integration seems robust against variance in saccade landing point, providing further evidence for its role in facilitating visual continuity.